A Big Dose of Lucky

by Marthe Jocelyn

  Add to that, what? I’m also a science experiment?

  ONE THOUGHT JABS ITS WAY THROUGH

  Why would someone go to that much trouble?

  And then give me away?

  My mother must be dead after all.

  IN THE MORNING

  I suppose I slept, maybe from three until five. I get up and shuffle to St. Joe’s as if it’s the same as any other morning. But this new information is like a suitcase full of stones that I have to lug with me every step I take, impossible to ignore.

  WHY TODAY?

  I’ve got my bucket and mop on the fifth floor, just finished 512, and I see Frankie in his too-big orderly’s jacket, joking with the staff at the nursing station. All I can think about is Judy saying the words hard penis, and I bump into my own bucket, sloshing dirty water all over the just-cleaned floor. All the time we were kissing, his penis was only a layer of blue jeans away. Dr. Blunt should have explained things better. My brain might pop like popcorn from how hot my face is. Plus, Frankie is saving money to be a medical student next year. Do the interns here still do what Andy Bannerman did?

  It’s too embarrassing to think about! I can’t even say hello, so I duck into the next room.

  One of the first instructions a cleaner gets is not to bother patients, no matter what. We’re supposed to creep around doing our job—mopping and wiping and collecting garbage or laundry—preferably when people are out of their rooms or dead asleep. Luckily, the bed in 514 is empty, so I whoosh around with the mop, kneeling down to reach under the bed. But then an old man lurches out of the bathroom. He’s got long silvery hair on his head and a silvery beard, like a bony, dried-up Santa Claus. His hospital gown barely covers his hips, and it gapes open at the front. One foot from my eyes are naked hairy legs and a collection of wrinkly old skin balloons, soft and dangling.

  Oh great. A world conspiracy to introduce me to the penis.

  HOW TO TELL JIMMY

  Hi, how’s it going?

  Hey, you know what?

  You’ll never guess. I mean, never.

  You know the list that your mother’s name is on?

  I think I’ve figured out what it’s for.

  HOW IT ACTUALLY GOES

  Jimmy waves and I think, Boy, is he in for a surprise. I have this crazy bomb to drop on his head, and there he is, strolling toward me, thinking the world is normal, that the strangest thing that’s ever happened was me showing up with his baby bracelet.

  He takes off his baseball cap, pushes the hair off his sweaty forehead and puts the cap back on, grinning, not remotely ready for the news I’m going to hit him with.

  “Hey,” he says. “I’ve got a game at four o’clock. Wanna come?”

  “Is there time for a milkshake?” I say. “My treat. I got my first-ever paycheck yesterday.”

  We walk to the Georgian Bay Creamery, me a bit jumpy and him not knowing that the bracelet was only the first raindrop and now here comes the hurricane.

  I get chocolate and Jimmy gets strawberry.

  “So, I saw Abby again yesterday.”

  He looks up without taking his mouth off the straw.

  “I met her mom.” One mom. Start slowly.

  His eyes widen. “Is it her?” he says, full attention. “Are you twins?”

  I shake my head. Already, yesterday’s guess is ridiculous and juvenile.

  “Not twins,” I say. “But…I’m pretty sure we’re somehow related. Abby and me.”

  “You sure look the same,” he says.

  “Also.” My cup is cold and sweaty at the same time. I take another sip. It occurs to me that I should not be the person telling him this, but…

  “What?”

  “You,” I say.

  He stops slurping on the straw. “What?” he says.

  “I might know something else.”

  I have this huge, awkward, blinding fact about Jimmy that he doesn’t have. If I’m right. What if I tell him and it turns out that I’m wrong? That would be a disaster.

  My mouth is coated in milkshake sweetness. I can’t say it. How do I do this?

  “Did you ever tell your mom about the list?”

  “No,” he says. “I swear. I never did.”

  “See, the list.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we should. Ask her.” I stop. Squeeze my eyes shut. I think of Abby pleading, Swear to die if you ever tell. Am I breaking my promise the very next day? Or just twisting it for my own convenience? If Judy and Preesha are afraid of being arrested for getting a baby that way, what reason did Sherry Fox have? Or Mr. and Mrs. Munro?

  How can it be okay for me to blab just because I want Jimmy to agree with me that it’s the craziest thing ever?

  “Your mom should be the one to tell you,” I say. “It’s not up to me. It’s kind of private.”

  “Tell me what?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Hey, no fair.” He thunks his cup on the table. “You can’t give all these hints about something and then not say it.”

  I just shake my head.

  “Malou,” he says.

  I get up and drop my half-done shake into the big bin.

  He gets up too and follows me. “I’ve been helping you,” he says. “I believed you and listened to you and made phone calls to strangers, all because you showed up out of nowhere waving around a list with my mother’s name on it. And now suddenly you go all silent? Like I’m not good enough to know your big fat secret?”

  Jimmy’s eyes are blazing. I’ve never made anyone this angry before, nowhere close. Not even when I ruined Dot’s stitchery project by accidentally tipping bleach over it. I feel this unexpected ripple of joy that he cares enough to be spitting mad. But mostly, I’m spitting mad at myself, which I also never was before, or never said so anyway. I’ve never felt the blood boil up to my eyeballs and spill over this way, saying crazy awful things without thinking.

  “Just go ask your mother!” I shout. “She’s the one with the big fat secret. She could have told me that very first day and saved all this trouble. You tell your mother her name is on a list and see what she says. You tell her that Andy Bannerman is at the top of the page.”

  I leave, running, pretending not to hear him shout my name.

  I DIDN’T MEAN IT TO COME OUT LIKE THAT

  But it did. And after running along a few streets with sweat pouring out of every pore, nothing but static between my ears, I stop and lean against the side of a bank. The bricks still hold today’s warm sunshine, and I press my back against them, learning to breathe again, trying not to cry.

  It’s too hard to carry someone else’s secret; that’s what I’m thinking.

  VIEW FROM THE HOSTEL BATHTUB

  I’m gazing up at a patch of ceiling that seems about to crumble down to join me in the water. All those layers of peeling paint! How do they manage to stay up there? And whoever painted in here, couldn’t they have picked a better color than beige? How about violet for a bathroom? Or marigold?

  I add more hot water, let it trickle over my head from a squeezed-up washcloth. Here I am, waiting for paint to drop off the ceiling, avoiding the murky swill of things I don’t want to think about. Like fighting with the first friend I ever made outside the Home. Like still not knowing who my mother is or how to find out. Like missing the Seven when I really, really need to ask for advice. But what would I ask that they’d have an answer for?

  FRANKIE STILL DOESN'T KNOW

  The next day comes, like it always does. I think about not going to work, except that I don’t know what else to do. I still need to buy food, right? And sleep somewhere. At least until I find out about my mother. And then it hits me. Until, but also after. There’s now, with questions waiting to be answered. But then there’s later too. There’s always. I’m going to have to feed myself, and buy clothes and toothpaste, and sleep somewhere, every single night forever and ever until I die. This is suddenly so scary, my legs go wobbly.

  “Hey, pretty lady!” Frankie�
��s grinning face emerges from the crowd at the hospital elevator. “Have you been avoiding me on purpose? Or am I just having a whole lot of bad luck?”

  “Hi, Frankie.” But I can’t think what to say next. Sorry, I’ve been preoccupied with tracking down my dead parents, only it turns out that at least one of them might not be dead and they probably never actually met because I was conceived as part of a medical experiment that involved a penis and a paper cup.

  That topic never showed up among Seventeen magazine’s suggestions for talking to boys.

  “Hello?” He taps the side of my head. “Anybody home?”

  I manage a half smile, but he can see that I’m only half trying.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” he quietly asks. The sass in his eyes switches to worry.

  I shake my head. No, that’s not it.

  “Because I can take a hint,” he says. “I’m not one of those pushy guys. My mama raised me to listen to girls.”

  I keep shaking my head, waiting for him to shush.

  “I’ll go away and stay away, if that’s what you want.” Finally, he stops. “What?”

  “You might be good at listening,” I say, “but I don’t have much practice at talking.” To boys anyway. “This week is…I’m trying to…just that I have to…can you maybe wait a few days while I…figure some stuff out?”

  He smiles his big wide smile. “Sure thing,” he says. “I’m happy so long as you’re not telling me to get lost.”

  JIMMY WAS SUPPOSED TO MEET ME AFTER WORK

  Today’s the day we planned to go to the marina for him to meet Abby. But—no surprise—he’s not waiting.

  Pete is there instead. For a second I think it’s accidental, but he waves from across the street just as Frankie’s blond friend Kevin is suddenly there behind me, coming out after his shift.

  “Oh,” says Kevin, looking over at Pete. “So that’s it, eh? Got ’em lined up? Maybe you should let Frankie down easy, hey, sugar?”

  “No,” I say quickly. “You’ve got it wrong. Pete’s just a friend.”

  Kevin shrugs and lopes off down the block, not giving me another glance.

  Just a friend, I think. Oh, and by the way, probably a half brother.

  I cross the road. Pete and I stand there looking at each other.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Yeah, hi,” I say.

  “Jim can’t make it.”

  I look at the ground, knowing he knows that’s not true, knowing he knows more than I do. “He’s still mad, huh?”

  “What the hell is going on?” says Pete, but in a nice way. “Jimmy is the nicest guy in the universe, never hurt anybody. How could you be having a fight with him?”

  “It’s a misunderstanding,” I say.

  That’s what Mrs. Hazelton always called a difference of opinion: a misunderstanding, with nobody to blame. Except, am I to blame here? At least partly? The only way to admit that would be to tell Jimmy the whole truth. Which I can’t do behind his mother’s back.

  “I just want you to know,” says Pete, “Lucy and me…we think you should make it up with Jimmy. We liked being a gang.”

  Me too.

  “Lucy?” I say.

  Pete laughs. “Yeah, Lucy’s a bit of a dragon, eh? But she’s warming up to you. She’s not exactly Miss Popularity with the white-bread girls at school. Come on,” he says. “I’ll walk with you. Are you going to the hostel place?”

  “I guess.” I don’t know what else to do. I swing my head around in case Frankie’s following, but he’s nowhere that I can see.

  “Still no luck? With the mother hunt?”

  I shake my head. Not exactly. Except that I know a whole lot more about his mother than I’d like to.

  “Pete?” I make my voice casual. “Did you ever ask your parents how they met?”

  He looks at me as if he’s wondering, Where did that question come from? But then he says, “My dad moved up here to work at the cordite factory in Nobel, you know? Where they made the explosives during the Second World War? About five miles up thatta way.” He points. “He’d tried to volunteer for the air force, but he broke his leg real bad when he was a kid, so he couldn’t join up. My mom was a secretary in the factory office.”

  He’s quiet for a minute and then clears his throat.

  “That was before she worked for the church,” he says. “Before she went…nutty. They met in the lunchroom and shared their sandwiches, the way my dad tells it. Half and half. He traded his cheese for her jelly.”

  He winces. “Sorry, that sounds a bit nasty.”

  I smile, but I’m waiting to ask something harder.

  “The way she is,” I say. “Was she praying so much before she worked for the church? Or did it start after? Do you know?”

  We’re nearly at the hostel. Pete shuffles around. “My dad says when they were married and wanted to have a baby, that’s when she started to pray. It took a long time. Some doctors said because Dad was working with those chemicals so much, they might never have babies. They even saw some specialist who was maybe gonna help. So once she got…you know, gonna have a child, she went even nuttier, thanking God for the blessing all day long, you know? I think that’s what drives Lucy so crazy. That it’s because of us being born that our mother went nuts.”

  WAIT A SECOND

  I stop right there on the street and stare at Pete. Sherry Fox is not the only one to have a file, right? Deborah Munro must have her history in that records room too! And Abby’s mothers and all the others on the list, each with her own folder.

  Now there’s a reason to go to work in the morning.

  THIRTEEN

  I GO BACK TO THE RECORDS ROOM

  Frankie and Kevin are sitting at the picnic table, so I use the stairs and go down to the sub-basement. The key works and everything looks the same, as if no one else has come in since the last time I was here. The 1947 box is still sitting on top of 1951.

  “Munro,” I mutter, fingers fumbling across the labels on the files. There are inches of Ms, way more than the Fs. I think I hear the elevator and reach over to flick the light off, crouching in the dark with my heart thudding. A minute goes by. Another minute. I’m counting, so I know. I open the door the teeniest crack and stare into the empty gloom of the hallway.

  “Munro.” Light back on, I pull a fistful of files out of the box so I can flip through them more quickly. McCarthy. Meeson. I skip a couple. Miller. Monroe. Is that it? Do I have the spelling wrong? But this file is for somebody called Stephen Monroe. Not the right one. Moore. Moskowitch. Munro! A quick look inside.

  Got it! Deborah Munro.

  I’m sure that’s the elevator. I slam off the light and shove the whole file up under my work smock, cramming it into the waistband of my skirt underneath so it’s not going to slip, even if it makes me lumpy.

  Voices outside. How many minutes have I been here? Is my break over? I imagine Frankie saying, “Where you been, girl?” Quiet now. I peek out again into the corridor. All clear. I slip out, stealthy like a kitty cat.

  Back in the staff room, I fold and double-fold the papers from Mrs. Munro’s file and tuck them into the pockets of my sweater. Next time, Judy and Preesha. Or, maybe—shoot! I should have started with the ones I don’t know! Connor or Thomas.

  One of them has to be my mother. Right?

  NOTE TO ORPHANS SURVIVING IN THE BIG WIDE WORLD

  According to the books, it’s all about pluck, which is an old-fashioned word that means confidence and persistence and always having your chin up.

  In real life, it turns out that even if those things help, you mostly have to be a liar and a sneak thief, along with a big dose of lucky.

  RECORDS ROOM, ROUND THREE

  I step off the elevator with a big sponge and a spray bottle of cleaner. If anyone is nearby, I plan to spritz and polish the panels around the buttons, where the germs from everyone’s fingers gather. But no need: the corridor is empty. I jam the sponge into my smock pocket and head str
aight to the records room, key extended and ready. I slip inside like steam through a crack. Lights on. I open the 1947 box and race through the tabs on the folders looking for the right ones.

  I’m muttering, “Connor, Thomas, Connor, Thomas,” over and over, like a magic spell. Connor is one of about eight Cs. I look inside to see her full name. Rachel Connor. It’s her, R. Connor, from the list. I squeeze the folder under my armpit and keep going. Malou Connor, I think. Malou Thomas.

  St. James, Sunderland, Tasker, Teagan, Thomas!

  “Thomas!” I say. “Gotcha!”

  The door opens, and my heart stops.

  RED-HANDED

  Mrs. Kowalski lets out a little shriek, like I scared her more than she scared me. One second later she’s growling, and I know I’m in the worst trouble of my life. But even as she’s asking me what the devil I’m doing among confidential records, even while she’s telling me that my employment is finished, even as she’s snapping that I’m a useless, thieving moron like all the other coloreds…during all this, the Connor folder is burning a hole in my armpit, and the Thomas file is scorching my fingers.

  How can I manage to take them with me?

  “Put down those papers this instant!” Mrs. Kowalski’s face is mottled with pink splotches. I carefully place Harriet Thomas’s folder on top of the 1953 carton next to me. Maybe she hasn’t seen the one under my arm.

  I clear my throat, trying to make my voice work. “I’m—”

  “You are nothing,” she says. She leans down to shift the box that she dropped when she came in. “Oof.”